The Five
The Five by Hallie Rubenhold is $2.99 at Amazon! This may be a leftover KDD from the week that’s going to expire soon. Elyse was incredibly excited about this one and mentioned is a few times on the site podcast. I swore she wrote a review, but I think I’m confusing this one with another book about Jack the Ripper.
Miscast in the media for nearly 130 years, the victims of Jack the Ripper finally get their full stories told in this eye-opening and chilling reminder that life for middle-class women in Victorian London could be full of social pitfalls and peril.
The “canonical five” women murdered by Jack the Ripper have always been dismissed as society’s waste, their stories passed down to us wrapped in a package of Victorian assumptions and prejudice. But social historian Hallie Rubenhold sets the record straight in The Five. In reality, only two of the victims were prostitutes, and Rubenhold has uncovered entirely new research about them all–in some cases, material no one has ever seen before.
The Five tells for the first time the true stories of these fascinating women. It delves into the Victorian experience of poverty, homelessness, and alcoholism, but also motherhood, childbirth, sexuality, child-rearing, work, and marriage, all against the fascinating, dark, and quickly changing backdrop of nineteenth-century London. From rural Sweden to the wedding of Queen Victoria, from the London of Charles Dickens to the factories of the Industrial Revolution and the high-class brothels of the West End, these women were not just victims but witnesses to the vagaries and vicissitudes of the Victorian age.
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Playing with Fire by R.J. Blain is 99c at select vendors! However, it’s been removed from Barnes & Noble. This is described as a “magical romantic comedy” and yes, that appears to be a unicorn on the cover. And I believe that unicorn is also a shifter of sorts. Some readers found this to be more on the bizarre side, which…fair point. While others found themselves laughing out loud.
Warning: This novel contains excessive humor, action, excitement, adventure, magic, romance, and bodies. Proceed with caution.
What do you get when you mix gorgons, an incubus, and the Calamity Queen? Trouble, and lots of it.
Working as the only human barista at a coffee shop catering to the magical is a tough gig on a good day. Bailey Gardener has few options. She can either keep spiking drinks with pixie dust to keep the locals happy, or spend the rest of her life cleaning up the world’s nastiest magical substances.
Unfortunately for her, Faery Fortunes is located in the heart of Manhattan Island, not far from where Police Chief Samuel Quinn works. If she’d been smart, she never would have agreed to help the man find his wife.
Bailey found her, all right—in the absolutely worst way possible.
One divorce and several years later, Bailey is once again entangled in Chief Quinn’s personal affairs, and he has good reason to hate her. Without her, he wouldn’t be Manhattan’s Most Wanted Bachelor, something he loathes. Without her, he’d still be married.
If only she’d said no when he asked her help, she might have had a chance with him. While her magic worked well, it came with a price: misfortune. Hers.
When Quinn’s former brother-in-law comes to her for help, he leaves her with a cell phone and seventy-five thousand reasons to put her magic to the test. However, when she discovers Quinn’s ex-wife is angling for revenge, Bailey’s tossed in the deep end along with her sexiest enemy.
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RECOMMENDED: Charlie All Night by Jennifer Crusie is $2.49! This was recommended by Candy in a very early version of Lightning Reviews and received an A-:
It features yet another somewhat-sullen-yet-adorable Crusie heroine, and Charlie is another mussed-and-not-traditionally-handsome-but-still-hot hero. I especially enjoyed the details on running a radio show. I have no idea if they’re accurate, but it almost doesn’t matter if they aren’t because Crusie makes it feel real.
Dumped by her boyfriend and demoted from WBBB’s prime-time spot, radio producer Allie McGuffey has nowhere to go but up. She plans to make her comeback by turning temporary DJ Charlie Tenniel into a household name. And if he’s willing to help cure her breakup blues with a rebound fling, that’s an added bonus.
Charlie just wants to kick back, play good tunes and eat Chinese food. He’s not interested in becoming famous. But he isinterested in Allie. And after all, what harm is a little chemistry between friends?
But suddenly their one-night stand has become a four-week addiction. Night after night on the airwaves, his voice seduces her and all the other women in town. He’s a hit. It looks as if Charlie’s solved all Allie’s problems except one. What is she going to do when he leaves?
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Love’s Charade by Jane Feather is $1.99! This is a historical romance that takes place during or close to the French Revolution. There is an age difference, if that’s your catnip. This book was also first published in 1986 and reviews on Goodreads say it’s pretty well slathered in crazysauce. Expect a lot of purple prose. Have any of you read this?
From New York Times bestselling author Jane Feather comes a thrilling romance of surprise and suspense, as one man discovers falling in love is the most dangerous thing he has ever done. . .
When Justin, Earl of Linton, found a half-starved child on the streets of Paris in the highly charged days before the Terror, his only thought was a bit of charity. He never imagined he would find an incomparably lovely young woman beneath tattered boys’ clothing–or that she would inspire in him a passion more intense than any he had ever known. But the beautiful Danielle had more secrets in store. . .and Justin would soon learn that one of them was a need for vengeance that might endanger them both.
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I enjoyed The Five very much. If nothing else, it points out how badly prejudices about the women helped botch the investigation.
Love’s Charade is a retread of These Old Shades with an open door to the bedroom. I read half of it and then it seemed to want to lurch off in another direction into a French Revolutionary adventure with the male lead constantly forbidding the female lead to “do that thing that she wanted to do” and then having to rescue her. I got bored and quit. But if you want TOS with sex, then grab it on sale!
Playing with Fire is a “magical romantic comedy (with a body count). It’s hilarious, ridiculous, delightful, irreverent, snarky, compelling, entertaining, ridiculously delightful, and delightfully ridiculous. You will laugh till you cry. Not safe for drinking beverages.
That’s not only a unicorn on the cover, that’s a unicorn with pyromaniac tendencies!
It’s totally worth a try at 99c. Come on, the first one’s almost free…
Also, the second book about the Playing with Fire characters, Burn, Baby, Burn (book 8 in the series if you follow the PwF link), is currently $1.99 on Amazon. More hilarity ensues! If you liked PwF, you’ll like BBB.
I love Jennifer Cruise (I think I would have abandoned the genre entirely if not for her), although the details in Charlie All Night don’t totally age well. (There are a couple of motivations for crimes neither of which would still rise to the level of “doing illegal stuff to prevent people from finding out.”)
Playing with Fire is still showing as .99 on the BN website. I read the first 5 novels/novellas of this series in a boxed set I picked up last year. Fun stuff. One’s about a serial killer princess.
Also, Crusie…. Charlie at Night’s one of my faves of hers.
I also very much enjoyed The Five. The author draws from a variety of sources to focus on what daily life was like for these women, who for various reasons existed at the fringes of society at the time of their deaths. It’s also rather depressing as, earlier in their lives, most of the women had been in very different “respectable” positions in life but (for mostly patriarchal culture reasons) couldn’t recover from losses.
There’s a boxed set of Garth Mix’s Old Kingdom/Abhorsen series on sale for $12.99. It includes four books: Sabriel, Lirael, Abhorsen, and Clariel. I absolutely adored these books in high school, though I was unable to get through clariel (I would recommend starting with it if you have never read the books, it’s actually a prequel but came out over a decade after the series ended).
I just also discovered that Nix has been putting out more in this series and now I need them!
@Katie Lynn: And the audiobooks (narrated by Tim Curry) are excellent.
@Katie Lynn: There are more Old Kingdom books out?! I also loved these back in the day, and I’m on a serious nostalgia reading kick. Must. Find.
@erica it’s called Goldenhand, and it looks like there’s also a novella called To Hold The Bridge. It’s possible the novella is also in Across the Wall, the novella collection that was put out. I haven’t read that one yet.
I agree with Cassandra; Jane Feather’s been disappointing me for so long, her last book was just mean, and filled with mean characters.
Jenny Cruise and The Five are so good!